We Happy Few Has Three Different Playstyle Choices in Place of Difficulty Settings

Yesterday, developer Compulsion Games released a new video detailing We Happy Few’s three different playstyles.

The new video comes on the back of a Steam update post the other day where the developer talked about how instead of having multiple difficulties it has decided to go with something it calls “selectable player experience.”

According to the developer, it has found that almost all players who have played the game in its early access form fall into three categories or playstyles. And so in the place of a difficulty setting, a playstyle selection has been implemented, that provides a more tailored playthrough of the game depending on how you want to play it.

You will have the choice of the following three playthrough styles:

Explorers (Birdwatcher): These gamers are story oriented or simply want to investigate the world but usually do not want to spend lots of time looking for food and water to stay alive, and are generally not looking for an arduous combat challenge.

Adventurers (Downer): These players prefer a more balanced gameplay with some challenge but not too much difficulty. They may or may not care about story but probably don’t hate having it around them. In this setting the game is a blend of survival and traditional action game elements – pretty similar to the game that is currently playable.

Survivors (Vigilante) : These gamers prefer the more hardcore aspects of survival games and love a punishing, if motivated, challenge. In this setting, the game increases the importance and demands of survival game mechanics.

Each of these playstyles brings inherent difficult and challenge adjustments, but aren’t purley based around difficulty changes. According to Compulsion Games, one should think of them as “packages” that, as mentioned above, tailor your experience to your personal preference. The sort of changes that come associated with the packages include, but are not limited to: your starting inventory items, the AI aggression, durability, and suspiciousness, crafting prerequisites, resource amounts and distribution, carrying capacity/encumbrance for your character, rate of food spoilage and weapon/item degradation, effects and duration of various drugs and other buffs, and much more.

It’s important to note that the Downer playstyles is the baseline version of the game, and that Birdwatcher and Vigilante are the two modified versions.

Additionally, you can also toggle “second wind” and “permadeath” options in the game. Permadeath means that when you die, you die forever and have to start over. Second wind, means that rather than dying you wake up post-mortem with less health and less items. For those of you who have been playing We Happy Few: you will now notice that this mechanic has been tweaked. Compulsion Games provided the following explanation for changes to the mechanic:

We felt that the existing second wind mechanic didn’t make much sense (“waking up” from dying in a damaged state), and it led to a bunch of problems with respawning, design (what happens if you can’t get a healing balm?), and problems in the story mode etc. So instead, as your health (or food/water/disease on Downer or Vigilante) gets low, eg 10-20%, you’ll enter that dying state without blacking out.

We Happy Few is currently available for PC via Steam Early Access and Xbox One via the Xbox One preview program. The game is slated to release sometime in 2017 for PC and Xbox One. Below, you can check out the new video detailing the game’s three playstyles:

Tyler Fischer is the Assignments Editor and News Editor at DualShockers. He specializes in writing breaking news, managing assignments, and organization. Born and raised in New York, Tyler studies journalism and public relations at SUNY New Paltz. In his free time he enjoys playing and watching soccer, getting lost in game lore, and writing comedy scripts.